I’ve gotten requests in comments and email for my thoughts, but I really don’t know much more than anyone else. I didn’t see it myself, but this explanation looks like the most likely one to me. Fortunately, it’s also the most benign one. I do think it’s a good reminder, though, that we need to get serious about missile defense.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s a lengthy disquisition on the contrail theory.
Thoughts on NASA procurement problems over at Space News:
To an outsider, it seems self-evident that NASA’s procurement process is the thing that is broken, or we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. Look at Falcon 9, from drawing board to successful first flight in much less than 10 years, and an expenditure on the order of half a billion dollars, and compare that with Ares 1, and tell me NASA still knows how to run programs. Compare it further with the program requirements documents for Mercury and Gemini, highly successful programs back when we knew a lot less about spaceflight than we do today.
There’s no way Ares 1 and the Orion crew capsule should have cost anywhere near what they were costing, or take anything like as much time as they were taking, to get up and fly. Whether the problem lies within NASA, or with the government procurement rules within which NASA is constrained to operate, is a question that needs answering. But the end result is the same: another decade lost, and American astronauts sitting by the side of the road with their thumbs out, waiting for the next Soyuz launch.
Arguably our most successful manned program, the Gemini program, was conducted from start to finish in less than five years. It cost (including 10 crewed flights) somewhere between $5 billion and $7 billion adjusted for inflation — less than we have spent on Constellation/Ares without even making it to our first orbital test flight. Gemini did everything we need from a crewed spacecraft, at least until we get out of cislunar space. Put a beefed-up heat shield on it and it could have gone to the Moon, and there were some studies for that. That’s what we did when the U.S. had a cumulative total experience in manned spaceflight of three man-days — not man-years, not even man-months.
I am not an engineer. My degrees are in history and business. If I am anything, I am a historian. So, as a historian, I ask: What’s so hard about replicating this level of capability, with technology that’s 40 years more mature?
Well, as another (amateur) historian, I’ll answer the question. That was then, this is now. In the sixties, actually accomplishing things in space was important, because we were in a race with the Soviets. Today, developing useful space hardware isn’t important. Maintaining jobs in certain congressional districts is.
…when it comes to space. My thoughts over at PJM.
Some vintage ideas.
Over at Forbes. I’m going to see if I can find a way to rebut it there.
Jon Goff has some interesting thoughts, spurred by a discussion from Joe Carroll last weekend at the Space Manufacturing Conference.
Jim Oberstar has lost. Not just lost his chairmanship of the House committee that oversees the FAA, but he’s completely gone from Congress.
What does this mean? It means that there’s a reasonable chance of getting an extension to the moratorium on FAA-AST regulation of passenger safety, which was due to expire in 2012. The suborbital industry hasn’t advanced as much as anticipated when the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act was passed in late 2004, so eight years wasn’t enough. The new chairman will probably be current ranking member John Mica of Florida. His district runs from the northern Orlando suburbs up to the coast from Daytona to St. Augustine, which isn’t really part of the space coast, but it’s just north of it, so I imagine he’ll be amenable to legislation that will help business there.
The Aviation subcommittee, currently run by Russ Carnahan of Missouri, will probably go to ranking member Tom Petri of Wisconsin. From his profile:
A persistent foe of government waste, Petri has repeatedly earned high marks from such organizations as the National Taxpayers Union, the Concord Coalition, Citizens Against Government Waste, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Watchdogs of the Treasury. Over many years he has repeatedly been named a “Guardian of Small Business” by the National Federation of Independent Business, and has won the “National Security Leadership Award” from the American Security Council.
Petri is known for his efforts to apply innovative solutions to problems, with a firm commitment to cost-effectiveness. Accordingly, Norm Ornstein, a prominent political scholar and expert on Congress, has called Petri “one of the most thoughtful members of Congress, filled with lots of ideas about how to make government better,” while senior Washington Post columnist David Broder has called him “a notably independent, creative legislator.”
Seems like he’d also be amenable to sensible legislation that promotes commercial spaceflight, which will also help NASA save money.
It’s really hard to appreciate what great and unexpected news this is. There were a lot of indications that Oberstar was in trouble, but it was still hard to believe that he could actually lose his election. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation should plan on trying to move some legislation this year. It’s hard to believe that the administration would be opposed, given its commercial-friendly space policy in general.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I just realized that I didn’t explain why Oberstar was so bad. Go read this article from 2005 at The Space Review.
[Update a while later]
Here’s a little disappointing news on the space front. I was hoping that Gabbie Giffords would lose in Arizona, and she almost did, but it looks like the libertarians kept her in office, by a couple thousand votes. But at least she’ll no longer chair the space subcommittee. Same thing happened to rocket scientist Ruth McClung. If those libertarians had voted for her, they’d have defeated (Arizona-bashing) Grijalva.
I often, even mostly vote libertarian in elections, to make a political point, but never in one that tight. I do prefer the lesser of the two evils, and it was particularly important in this election to remove as many Democrats as possible.
[Update early afternoon]
The Arizona races are still too close to call.
I’ll be driving back down to LA tomorrow, down the coast, so I may not be posting much until tomorrow night or Tuesday. Thoughts on the conference later.
Has synthesized a megabyte chromosome. Everything in the cell was derived from the chromosome and the natural traces were all deleted. They are digitizing biology. Converting analog genetic code to digital. Now they can go the other way, from ones and zeros to living organisms. Huge progress over past two decades. Big breakthrough new algorithm in 1995. New approach to sequencing pieces by breaking them down and putting into the computer. Government review process said it couldn’t work, so they had to find their own money. After it proved they worked, more money than they knew what to do with. Worked from microbes to humans in five years. First published in Science about ten years ago. First diploid genome in 2007. Used his own to avoid having to get permissions. It has now become de rigeur to put your genome on the Internet. Found that there is 1-3% difference between unreleated humans, which is ten times more than previously thought.
Had hoped for first synthetic species last year, but was wrong. Needed proofreading software. Had a sequence that could boot with ten synthetic sections and one natural one, so they knew where the problem was.
44% of genes have more than one heterozygous variant. Amazing that we have so much in common, and that things work as well as they do. Now can buy a small machine for half a million dollars that will sequence a genome in a couple days. Seeing more variation in Africa than between African, Venter, and Chinese.
NASA has been doing selection for a long time, but not calling it that, by screening for things like inner-ear changes, rapid bone regeneration, DNA repair, strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, low risk for genetic disease, etc. Have more microbes than human cells (we have several trillion bacteria), and their gene population exceeds ours by orders of magnitude. Millions of genes in mouth, intestinal tract, vagina, etc., and we don’t know much about them. Thousands of new ones brought up to ISS every trip. Have to understand out own genetic code, the codes of the microorganisms, and the interactions between them and the environment. Starting to make progress as we learn more. Esophageal cancer fastest growing one since seventies, and don’t know if microbes are causal, or symptom. Studying metabolomics of microbes. Ten percent of chemicals in our bloodstream are bacterial metabolites, and we don’t know if they help, hurt, cause or suppress disease, cause mood, etc. Need to know microbes and correlate. Important for space trips, and more important for long ones. Synthetic biome community might eliiminate disease organisms (infections and dental decay). Eliminate methanogens and sulfur producers. Body odor primarily caused by microbes. Best way to eliminate smell of armpits is to kill microbes (alcohol works better than perfume). Add cells that help metabolize algae-based food. There is an abundance of microbes (half of earth’s biomass). Has taken samples every two hundred miles in the ocean by filtering seawater, and sequence everything on the filters. Don’t know what they look like, but know what their genomes look like. Expected limited diversity in each area, but discovered great amount, and discovered many new organisms from sequencing. Also looked at deep-sea microbes near volcanic vent. Don’t need organic compounds, make everything from CO2 and hydrogen as energy source. Found same level of diversity deep in the earth, but more clusters like people expected in the oceans, perhaps because of radiation protection and less mutations. No point in sequencing new mammals to look for new genes — have probably seen it all, but microbes can provide new genes from any new sample.
Minimal life — smallest genome, 482 protein-coding genes and 43 RNA, discovered in 1995. Don’t know how small one can go, how many are essential for cellular life. Did gene knockouts, but discovered that only way to get there was synthesis. Comparative genomics can only take us so far. Over half of human genome are transposons, that can randomly insert in the cell. If cell survives gene replacement, defined as non-essential, but what’s essential and non-essential depends on context (e.g., sucrose and glucose can keep alive, but one or the other can’t). Knocking out a gene doesn’t tell you whether its function is essential, because there may be redundancy. Questions: could they make a synthetic DNA, and could they boot it up? Longer the genes, more errors, so needed error-correction methods. Discovered that the software could build its own hardware for virii. Thought it would be harder to boot up a full bacterium than a virus. Converted one species into another by reprogramming DNA. Isolated DNA, figured out ways to inject in a related cell. Thought would have to eliminate chromosome in recipient cell, but discovered that enzymatic processes in the cells would do it for them. Cell briefly has both chromosomes, it starts to make new enzymes, including restriction enzymes that chew up the original DNA, and a new cell with the coding of the donor cell. This allowed transplants (2007). They could then start to build up a new organism, piece by piece.
D/ radiodurans: “the ultimate DNA Assembly Machine.” Highly radiation resistant, but couldn’t get it to work outside the cell. Based on yeast, managed to assemble 600,000 base-pair organism, but couldn’t boot it up. Breakthrough was simple in-vitro recombination, with three enzymes, and one-step reaction at 50 degrees centigrade, allowing automation (just synthesized mouse genome). Can imagine robot that can “learn” how to do this, accelerating learning rate. Problem was assembling in a eucharyot, but having problem getting the chromosome from yeast and transplanting into another organism. Discovered that they had to methylate it. Now can modify things with yeast, isolate it, methylate it, and transplant into target organism. DNA synthesis no longer the barrier.
Now they’re watermarking the genes with things like quotes from James Joyce (got complaints from his estate for copyright violation). Idea is to put stop-codes in to not overrwrite critical parts.
They’re now up to a millions base pairs, and now that things are automatable, entering a new era. 40 million genes discovered to date, are the design base for the future. Will be able to specify metabolism to design future organisms. Because so much gene diversity, and so few scientists, need more approaches for rapid screening, and pass results on to the humans. select for chemical production, viability, etc.
Could use for mitigating carbon buildup, provide medicine, food, clean water as population grows. Three people alive on the planet for every person in 1946 when he was born, and soon four. Need new approaches. Plants not very productive systems, very limited, but microalgae has good potential (orders of magnitude better for fuel production). Only making ethonol from corn because there is a corn lobby, not because it’s smart. Designing fuels with CO2 as a carbon source. Instead of squeezing cells, getting them to pump the fuel out continuously. Exxon has put $600M on the line to do this. Expect useful economic processes in ten years. Have to design new algae strains to get there, because no natural ones will do the job. Food production for spaceflight very inefficient, but new designs can improve. Totally within the realm of the next few years. Microbial fuel cells also key application, with drinking water as output. Some bacteria use nanowires that can interface with the metal. Also working on reverse vaccinology, focusing on meningitus B and flu. Could help with rapid production of new vaccines, no longer grow them in chicken eggs.
Many reviews of the ethics of this: first priority of the Obama bioethics committee. This is likely to be the number one wealth generator for the next century. At early stages — first stage took fifteen years (longer than expected). What took years can now be done in a day, and shortly will be able to do millions of times per day.
For spaceflight, need to look at human genetic code, sequence microbiome to understand their influence on health and disease, and then all the issues from food, recycling waste, and perhaps even improve on stem cells to make us more radiation resistant/protective.
Craig Venter is speaking next, on synthetic genomics. I’m missing at least the first half of the Michigan-Penn State game so I can report it. I’ll be interested to see if he discusses space applications.
By the way, be sure to check out Space Transport News and Parabolic Arc for more conference coverage, as well as the conference Twitter feed.
Pete Worden is speaking now, and commenting on the fortunate confluence of the two conferences that allowed this talk. Venter one of the leading scientists of the 21st century, with over 400 scientists on staff devoted to genetic research and associated moral issues.